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Non-human Characters

Throwback Thursday time. I made this post back in September of 2013 while still working on Jasper. It’s interesting, at least to me, how much the story’s changed even in this stretch of time. I’ve since changed the title to Jasper for simplicity. Jasper’s Fall, this story’s prequel, will be put on the backburner until I hammer out later books in the series. And I’ve introduced one more robot character that impacts the characters directly, bringing that total to three.

This draft of Jasper City is all about adding scenes and chapters where the plot had holes to fill. With the chapter count going from 14 to 35, I’ve got a lot of work to do. Taking the advice of one beta reader, one plot point I am expanding is the presence of sentient robots in the story.

The robots are probably the most difficult aspect of the story so far. Their original purpose was to show how far the “old society” (that is, our society) had advanced before war and natural disaster turned North America into a wasteland. They play an important part in Jasper City, a bigger role in Jasper’s Fall, and an even bigger role in the sequel I’m planning. So they couldn’t remain as a decoration for worldbuilding purposes for very long. The question then became: How does one flesh out a character who doesn’t have…